Daniel Ek Weight - Daniel Ek Net Worth Daniel Ek Weight Read more... Daniel Ek Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advert. Daniel Ek (born 21 February ... Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advert Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler and has been a part of the Nordic auction company Tradera and Evertigo.

Daniel's previous jobs include CTO at Jajja Communications, CTO at Stardoll and CEO of uTorrent, the world's most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads. Daniel Ek joined the IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg. He enrolled at the Royal Institute of Technology but did not complete his degree. In 2006, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler, set up Spotify AB in Stockholm, Sweden. In October 2008 the company launched its legal music streaming service Spotify. Daniel Ek currently serves as a CEO of Spotify. As of 2012 he is ranked 395th on the Bri... Is Daniel Ek, Spotify founder, going to save the music industry … or destroy it? | Technology | The Guardian The Observer Is Daniel Ek, Spotify founder, going to save the music industry … or destroy it? Swedish entrepreneur tells record labels that the best way to survive is to give everything away for free. Most have signed up – but many are yet to be convinced Daniel Ek kept banging on music executives' doors until they listened to him.

Photograph: Andrew Testa/Rex Features The Observer Is Daniel Ek, Spotify founder, going to save the music industry … or destroy it? Swedish entrepreneur tells record labels that the best way to survive is to give everything away for free. Most have signed up – but many are yet to be convinced Share on Messenger Close On one wall of Daniel Ek's sparsely furnished office in the Stockholm headquarters of Spotify , there is a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Ek, 30, doesn't immediately strike you as the unreasonable type. His face is placid, his voice mild with a transatlantic accent, his body language passive. He wears a rumpled red Ralph Lauren polo shirt, jeans and white trainers. His scalp and chin have equal amounts of stubble, which makes his head look reversible. "I think Daniel Ek is unbelievable but I don't think you can say he's a charming guy," says Per Sundin, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Sweden.

"He comes across as non-threatening in a business with a lot of big personalities," says Gustav Söderström, Spotify's chief product officer. Seven years ago, Ek began approaching record labels with a bold proposition: to make their valuable content available to rent rather than buy, and for free. Most were understandably wary. This new product looked as if it might be the killer of the music industry rather than, as its quietly purposeful creator claimed, its saviour. Ek won that first battle for hearts and minds. Although many rival services are available, Spotify has become synonymous with streaming, the same way Google is with searching. Last month, on the fifth anniversary of its launch, it made more than 20million songs available to 24 million users in 32 territories. Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri recently valued the company at $5.2bn. Inevitably, it has made some impassioned enemies. Radiohead's Thom Yorke recently said: "I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing," and called the industry's support for the company "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse" . But it has also made Ek many friends.

He fraternises with entrepreneurs, rock stars and other interesting, powerful folk. His next appointment after me is with dubstep star Skrillex. "I get to learn from some of the most inspiring people in the world, whether it's the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses or famous brain surgeons, because I get invited to those things," Ek says evenly. "And on top of that I get to hang out with artists I've admired since I was a kid. That's pretty fun." Spotify's head office occupies the top four floors of a building in an upmarket district of Stockholm and has the typical accoutrements of a hip young tech company. There are graffitied murals, whiteboards covered in Post-it notes, fridges stocked with complimentary soft drinks and a staircase lined with informal employee snapshots. Meeting rooms are named after songs: Paranoid, Poker Face, Pretty Vacant. There are areas dedicated to pool, darts and table tennis. Ek still smarts at the memory of his 21-1 table-tennis defeat by a visiting Justin Bieber. "I'm the worst loser ever so I don't even try unless I know I can win," he says.

Spotify also has distinctly Swedish features, such as an unusually flat, democratic management structure and an attitude best described as lagom. "Lagom means not too little but not too much – just enough," explains Ian Robbins, Spotify's US-born product owner of artist products. "It comes up a lot. Our former font was called Lagom. It's very Swedish and it's pervasive." There is, however, a more practical reason why Spotify was a revolution that could only have happened in Sweden, and the seeds were sown 15 years ago. In the late 1990s, the Swedish government decided to build a society of digital natives. It treated high-speed broadband as an essential public utility and funded schemes to enable every citizen to buy a computer. Unfortunately for the music industry, this digital evangelism coincided with the launch of the American file-sharing site Napster. Young Swedes could now access any music they liked, for free, faster than anyone else, and they did so with gusto. Sundin, a shaven-headed man with a blunt, sardonic manner, tells me that he began to worry when neighbours mentioned that their teenagers had told them not to bother buying music anymore.

With the arrival of Sweden's own Pirate Bay in 2003, piracy became endemic and the industry contracted at sickening speed. In 1999 worldwide revenue reached an all-time high of $27bn; by 2008 it had almost halved, despite the industry's various legal and technological attempts to fight back. Sweden had the worst piracy in the western world. Sundin estimates that at Universal and, before that, Sony BMG, he personally laid off 200 staff. In 2006, during a Swedish election debate, both leading candidates for prime minister said that they wouldn't criminalise a generation for downloading music, effectively endorsing piracy. After the debate, Sundin's mother phoned to advise him to find another job. "It was already going down and then they said that," he remembers with a grimace. "It was terrible. All the newspapers were laughing at us." So when Ek came knocking, Sweden was the ideal petri dish for a radical experiment. Sundin compares the industry to an alcoholic who has to reach rock bottom before he admits he has a drinking problem.

He was so impressed by Spotify's demo version that he convinced his bosses to back it: together with other large labels and the Merlin consortium of key independents, Universal owns around 20% equity in Spotify. "I said to my team, 'This is Jesus coming to town! If this fucks up we're going to be dead so let's go all in.'" "The music industry was in the shitter," says Ek. "What did they have to lose? On top of that, I literally slept outside their offices, coming in week after week, hammering them down argument by argument." Spotify went live (by invitation only) in Scandinavia, the UK, France and Spain in October 2008. A few months later, Swedish prosecutors backed by the international music industry successfully took Pirate Bay to court, and the government finally introduced EU anti-piracy measures. "It was the perfect storm," says Sundin. "It wasn't just that it was now illegal. People discovered Spotify and realised it was actually better than piracy." To Ek, the music industry's nosedive was a problem to be solved. "There was this paradox," he says. "People were listening to more music than ever in history and yet the music industry was doing worse and worse.

So the demand for content was there but it was a different business model." Spotify in numbers. Graphic: Pete Guest Ek's theory was that people were willing to do the right thing but only if it was just as rewarding, and much less hassle, than doing the wrong thing. He says that Spotify subscribers don't pay for content – they can get that for free through piracy – they pay for convenience. Owen Smith, 27, a Brit who works on Spotify's platform strategy, understands that transition first-hand. At university he filled a hard drive with pirated mp3s. "I'm of the Napster generation," he says, a little bashfully. "It was all there and everyone was doing it and it was almost too good to be true." After signing up to Spotify in 2008, his behaviour changed. "I didn't think, 'This is the morally better choice'. It was just easier. Over time the hard drive became disconnected. It's funny when it has happened to you and you didn't even realise it." Sundin has the bullish optimism of someone who has survived a near-death experience.

In Sweden, total industry revenues are now approaching 2003 levels; Universal is almost back to its 1999 peak; piracy has plummeted. "Sweden has gone from bad boy to poster boy in five years," he says with a triumphant grin. "Everyone is looking at what happens in Sweden." Daniel Ek has straddled the worlds of music and tech since his childhood in Stockholm's down-at-heel Rågsved district. His maternal grandparents were both musicians and he writes and plays music himself: a mint-green electric guitar hangs on his office wall. He is also a computer prodigy who was earning several thousand pounds a month from designing and hosting websites while he was still at school. After dropping out of an engineering course at the prestigious Royal Institute of Technology, he became a hotshot programmer for internet marketing company Tradedoubler, treating himself to a red Ferrari and a club-hopping lifestyle, but he was unfulfilled and depressed. He sold the car, swapped his city-centre flat for a cabin near his parents, concentrated on music and meditation, and began hanging out with his former Tradedoubler employer Martin Lorentzon, who was equally disillusioned.

In 2005, the two decided to collaborate on a new project that they genuinely cared about. The company name originated during a last-minute brainstorming session when Lorentzon misheard one of Ek's suggestions (Ek forgets what) and registered the domain name Spotify, now retroactively explained as a portmanteau of "spot" and "identify". When Ek wasn't overseeing a handful of engineers in a converted three-room flat above a coffee shop, he was out trying to secure global licences from record labels. After a wave of rejections he narrowed his focus to Europe, which still took a nerve-racking two years with no income. "When we said we wanted to give it away for free and that would help the industry there was a credibility gap that took two years to overcome," admits Jonathan Forster, Spotify's European general manager and one of Ek's first dozen employees. Minds only began to change when Ek loaded a demo with pirated tracks so that label executives could try it for themselves. Söderström, 37, compares Spotify to Skype: it wasn't a brand new idea but it was faster, easier and more social than the rest. The basic user experience remains unchanged.

You can search for any song in the catalogue, on an interface similar to the iTunes store, and play it as quickly as if it were on your own desktop. Ek was obsessed with shaving milliseconds off the response time. The human brain perceives "instant" as anything less than 250 milliseconds; Spotify plays songs within 285. Songs can then be shared via playlists, over 1billion of which have been created so far. You either listen for free, if you don't mind intrusive adverts and a 10-hour monthly cap, or pay $4.99 a month ("unlimited") for uninterrupted listening, or $9.99 ("premium") to listen on a mobile device. The 2009 introduction of the mobile service, including an offline feature, was the turning point in terms of incentivising users to pay. Between 20-25% of Spotify users (currently six million people) upgrade to a subscription. "A lot of people said it was really stupid to start charging when everyone else was free, and we weren't as sure about it as we like to say we were," says Söderström.

"It was a big risk." Spotify's product development motto is spelt out in colourful plastic letters on a wall near Ek's office: "Think it, build it, ship it, tweak it." Usually, its instincts are correct. Rather than clogging the site with secondary services, for example, it has made the app available to third parties such as the gig-listing service Songkick and journalism sources including Guardian Music . Its current focus is on "discover", which introduces listeners to music via Spotify Radio, curated playlists and algorithmic recommendations. Its only significant blunder to date occurred during its alliance with Facebook in September 2011, when it prioritised sharing over privacy. Suddenly existing users found that all their listening was public while new ones couldn't sign up without a Facebook account. After a fierce backlash, both obligations were dropped. "We look back on that as a 'duh' moment," says Robbins. "How did we not understand that?" He shrugs. "We learn by doing." Despite Spotify's lagom demeanour, its ultimate goal is far from moderate. "I want everyone in the world to be able to listen to anything ever created," says Söderström.

"And I think we'll get there." For that to happen, many artists remain to be convinced. Although former refuseniks Pink Floyd recently came on board, the representatives of acts ranging from the Beatles to Boards of Canada are currently holding back most or all of their catalogue. Some, like the Black Keys and Thom Yorke's new band Atoms for Peace have been publicly hostile. "New artists get paid fuck all with this model. It's an equation that just doesn't work," Yorke's bandmate Nigel Godrich recently tweeted. "The concern is genuine and understandable," says the unflappable Söderström. "If you put your entire life into creating art, of course you're going to be careful about it. Fortunately we now have tangible data. We try to inform and be as transparent as possible." The key issue is royalty payments. Spotify says that around 70% of its income subscriptions is paid into an industry pool, from which individual copyright holders pay their artists, albeit not very transparently. Artists' income will only grow as the user base expands. Spotify finally launched in the US in 2011 and eventually aims to cover the entire world.

By last February, it had paid out $500m to rights holders to date; by the end of 2013 that figure will have doubled. Of course, that $1bn pie is divided into an awful lot of slices. Spotify in numbers. Graphic: Pete Guest Mark Williamson, director of Artist Services, says that payments are not calculated on a per-stream basis but insists, "The rates are equitable across labels." Working back from their royalty statements, several artists have calculated the rate at around 0.4p per stream, so you need over 200 plays to match the 99p paid for one iTunes download. Whether or not that is fair depends on what you're comparing it to. If you count every stream as a lost sale then it's disastrous. If, however, you compare it to YouTube (whose rates are secret but reportedly lower) or piracy then it's not so bad. "This is not a dollar business anymore; it's a nickel-and-dime business," insists Sundin. "If you don't get played then you're not popular and you don't get money. Accept it.

Kids like what they like." He pulls up a graph on his laptop to show me that one of his artists, the Swedish electronic dance-music producer Avicii, had 3.7 million plays the previous day while U2 receive about 250,000 every day. Traditionally, the average album earned most of its revenue within a couple of months and then dipped as interest waned and retail shelf-space was ceded. On Spotify, theoretically, a song never need stop earning money. The Scandinavian experience suggests that Spotify is good for the industry's overall revenues because it benefits heavyweight stars, back catalogue and viral hits. Stephan Markovits, who works in the Swedish electronic dance-music scene, points out that Million Voices, a 2012 single by local DJ Otto Knows, has been streamed more than 28 million times. "People create playlists, they have house parties, they go to work on the bus, so a song will live for longer rather than going up and down quickly," he says. However, high-profile sceptics such as the musician David Byrne have argued, it will not help every kind of artist. Consider a cult band who don't have hits but currently sell enough CDs to survive.

If every single one of their fans switched from ownership to streaming, the band would need at least 200 times as many new listeners to make up for the shortfall. The numbers game doesn't work for them. The sceptics see Spotify as inimical to new and independent musicians. "We don't support Spotify at all," says Lohan Presencer, chief executive of Ministry of Sound, whose roster includes Wretch 32, Example and London Grammar. "From a business perspective it doesn't make sense for us and our artists." He believes that as well as paying poor royalties, Spotify cannibalises sales, offers less promotional benefit than YouTube, and "propagates a myth that music is free". And he is dubious about Spotify's expansion plans because it still makes a net loss: €58.7m in 2012 despite revenues of €434.7m. "How sustainable is that business model? Is it going to get 100 million users or is it going to run out of money before that point? Should we, as an industry, be supporting a business that has no real prospect of succeeding? The justification that it is saving the industry from piracy is a bit rich.

Their objective is to build a business and then to sell it before they run out of cash." Söderström counters that Spotify "could have been profitable several times" but has chosen to invest everything in new staff (currently more than 1,000 worldwide), products and territories. He also says that Ek, while enormously wealthy on paper, has not cashed in by selling Spotify. "Why hasn't he? Because he actually cares about music. He wants to solve that problem. He would like to see a world where you can listen to music without ripping people off." Forster adds: "No matter how many times I say that Daniel's not interested in the money nobody's ever going to believe me. But frankly that's not what motivates him. He likes to build things. If you think about a product that gives you the potential to touch literally everyone in the world, it's boy's own stuff. There's no issue with Daniel thinking big." Apparently not. Spotify was born out of a single correct assumption about human behaviour, namely that music fans would embrace, and even pay for, a legal service if it was virtually frictionless. Now the company's colossal volume of granular data makes assumptions unnecessary.

Before digital music, the industry's understanding of consumer behaviour ended at the point of sale, but Spotify knows who listens to what, and when and where they do so. Artists can tweak their tour schedules based on regional data or choose singles based on which album tracks are most popular. Spotify already changes how music is heard. It may soon change how it is made. "I think we're in the middle of a transition but it hasn't moved all the way," says Ek. "Why are we releasing albums the same way as we did 10 years ago? Music is no longer restricted by the format it's on. "We make audio records alone when they could be audio-visual-interactive. That's what I find interesting: What's the future of the album?

That's something we've only begun to touch." The rapper and headphone entrepreneur is launching a rival to Spotify, featuring high-quality streams and curated recommendations, with Trent Reznor as chief creative officer Published: 5 Dec 2013 Avicii, Daft Punk, Robin Thicke, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are most streamed and 'Shazamed' artists Published: 4 Dec 2013 Producer and rapper expected to pocket $250m from sale of minority stake of US headphone company to private equity firm Published: 27 Sep 2013 Musician Zoe Keating in debate with Amanda Palmer, Imogen Heap and will.i.am, Spotify, Songkick and Vevo. By Stuart Dredge Published: 29 Oct 2013 Why is it Called Spotify? | Rewind & Capture Why is it Called Spotify? March 9, 2014 by Adam Lang 3 Comments Who was the most popular male artist(s) on Spotify in 2013? Before you read this post, think back to how you used to listen to music. Now think, how you used to run with your tunes – skip, skip, skip.

Spotify is a commercial music streaming service that was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by Daniel Ek. The company was founded in 2006 and launched their first application in October 2008, however it was not made available to US users until July 2011. The delay was caused by long negotiations with four major record companies: Sony, EMI, Music Group and Universal. Listeners can makes playlists and filter their search requirements by artists, genre, albums and more. In December 2013, Spotify launched free streaming on mobile and desktop versions. However if you want to mute Flo (Progressive Insurance) ads, Spotify requires you to upgrade, charging a small monthly fee. If chosen, a user can also integrate their Spotify account with Facebook and Twitter, this way friends can access and share their favorite songs. Why is Spotify called Spotify? Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Tradedoubler (internet marketing company) and Ek were randomly yelling out potential names when Ek misheard Spotify. After a quick Google search, he recognized the name was not taken and shortly after registered the domain. Ek, NOW claims Spotify stems from SPOT and IDENTIFY. #1.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis What artist did you listen to most in 2013? Thanks for reading Why is it called Spotify? #whyisitcalledSpotify Spotify Competitors - Rivalfox Paris About Spotify Spotify is a music streaming service that was launched in 2008 and has its headquarters in Luxembourg. The company was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Among its investors are Goldman Sachs and The Coca-Cola Company. Spotify's users are able to browse music through a big variety of filters, such as music name, artist name, music category and record label. Users are also able to create, edit and share playlists, both with other users and in their own social media profiles. All of these services are free. Paid subscriptions, in turn, allow users to remove advertisements as well as download music. Despite the fact that Spotify competitors are getting stronger, it's possible to affirm that the biggest challenge the company needs to deal with is related to its own business model. Artists often complain about the low amount of money they receive, and a big pop star have recently pulled out of the service. It's also worth noting that the music streaming industry is especially sensitive to legal issues.

The concept of authorship was dramatically changed by the internet, but still in an uncertain way. In the next years, more clear definitions about authorship rights, usage rights and downloading permissions should be made, and they will have a direct impact on the streaming services. About the Music Streaming Industry In 2005 the music streaming industry generated a revenue of approximately $200 million, which grew to a more than $1 billion revenue in 2013. But despite this impressive growth, the companies of this industry are often criticized for paying few money for music artists - the industry average is of $0.00217 per play, which means that to make $0.99 an artist's song has to be streamed 456 times. The music streaming industry will soon be impacted by the entrance of two tech giants in it: Google, that acquired the service Songza, and Apple, that acquired Beats Music. Compare Spotify's Digital Performance - Request a Demo OK Daniel Ek Email - Daniel Ek Net Worth Daniel Ek Email Read more... Daniel Ek Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify.

He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advert. Daniel Ek (born 21 February ... Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek Net Worth is $310 Million. Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advert Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. He founded his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. His ventures have included the founding of Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler and has been a part of the Nordic auction company Tradera and Evertigo. Daniel's previous jobs include CTO at Jajja Communications, CTO at Stardoll and CEO of uTorrent, the world's most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads. Daniel Ek joined the IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg. He enrolled at the Royal Institute of Technology but did not complete his degree.

In 2006, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler, set up Spotify AB in Stockholm, Sweden. In October 2008 the company launched its legal music streaming service Spotify. Daniel Ek currently serves as a CEO of Spotify. As of 2012 he is ranked 395th on the Bri... Daniel Ek Bio, Facts, Networth, Family, Auto, Home | Famous Founders | SuccessStory Networth : $400 Million Daniel Ek is a Sweden based musician and software programmer. He is best known for Spotify, a mobile phone music service that gives access to a huge database of artist tunes. His sales force is present in San Francisco, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, and a dozen more countries where he offers his services. Ek has become an important name in the industry of music. He is passionate about music, and has contributed towards it in his own ways. Career He established his first business at the age of 14 in 1997. He had enrolled in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, but could not complete his studies, and quit without a degree.

He was the founder of Advertigo, an advertising company that TradeDoubler acquired, also been a part of Tradera, the Nordic auction company and Evertigo. He previously worked as a CEO for µTorrent. The Origin of Spotify Daniel Ek with Mark Zuckerberg Daniel Ek founded Spotify in 2006, along with Martin Lorentzon, the co-founder of TradeDoubler. It was setup in Stockholm, and its first legal service for music streaming was launched in 2008. The company grew pretty quickly, and thousands of people from Sweden found it as the ultimate music service they had been looking for. While using Spotify, a user does not need to download every song or album he wants to hear. The desired music can be streamed via Internet either through a mobile phone or a co. At present, Daniel is serving as Spotify’s CEO, and is responsible for all its operations and distribution tasks. The Spotify has around 10 million active users, and the database has more than 15 million songs. All this is available for free, merely at the cost of hearing an advertisement in between the songs. It is easy and as fast as iTunes, flexible as Napster, and cheap as an online radio.

Unlike most services, it is open for all, and does not support piracy. It can also be accessed over FaceBook, where you can see playlists of your friends, and create your own jukebox. Daniel Ek received a guitar and a Commodore 20 computer from his maternal grandparents at the age of 5, which he used to hone his talents, and become a leader in the music industry. Today, with his business activities, he has become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Sweden. Know More The future of music, according to Spotify's Daniel Ek - CNET CNET The future of music, according to Spotify's Daniel Ek The future of music, according to Spotify's Daniel Ek Your home's tunes controlled by a wave of the hand or a voice command? It could happen, and the big-thinking Swede believes his music service could be the soundtrack to that very plugged-in vision. Up Next Now begins the @realDonaldTrump era Spotify's Daniel Ek Greg Sandoval AUSTIN, Texas--Daniel Ek was waving his arms in the air, as if molding invisible clay. He swiped his right hand karate-chop style, made a big loop, and then grabbed an imaginary dial with his left and twisted his fist.

Ek, you see, was talking about the future. In this not-so-far-off future, maybe a decade from now, we're all connected, everywhere, all the time -- perhaps via Google Glass , perhaps via sensors built into our clothes, or through other wearable computing devices. Our touch-screen life will require no touching whatsoever, as we control what we're listening to or seeing through hand motions or simply by talking. And we'll experience it all in 3D. In this vision, too, exists a musical soundtrack, tailored for you, fitting for the moment, and piped in not just through typical speakers or headphones but perhaps through musical lightbulbs -- or at least through "more intelligent systems" such as the kind Ek is considering for the house he is remodeling in his hometown, Stockholm, Sweden. New musical genres will also emerge as the technology pushes creativity. After all, you'll be able to reach out and take control of the sound waves. "Actually, I don't want the string section," said Ek, grabbing the invisible song with his left hand. "I'll just kill that." Ek's role in this all this? He wants Spotify, the company he co-founded and leads, to provide the soundtrack.

It's tall talk, for sure. Yet it's hard to dismiss Ek's optimism. He's already defied the odds, leading Spotify further than any digital music company with the exception of Pandora . More importantly, with 24 million active users, 6 million of whom pay to subscribe, and a speedy growth rate, Spotify has become the big music label's second largest digital revenue source behind Apple. The on-demand, streaming model is the fastest-growing part of the beaten-down music industry -- creating an entirely new revenue stream to boot -- and, for now, Ek is leading the charge. Josh Lowensohn "He's one of the few guys that picked up on the vision and ran with it," said David Kusuk, a digital music consultant who co-wrote the 2005 book " The Future of Music ," predicting the shift to the access anywhere model, or what he calls, "music as water." "I give Ek credit for having the guts to try it and really to stick his neck out there." I met with Ek, who is 30, at last month's SXSW festival in Austin, where Spotify rented a small house on the east side of town and painted it Spotify green.

A parade of musicians -- rapper Angel Haze and singer-songwriter Tom Odell among them -- played in the back yard. Ek held meetings at a picnic table and soaked in the scene. He wore the same beige Gibson T-shirt two days running, jokingly blamed the music labels negotiations for his baldness, and apologized for his dark sunglasses even though we sat in the shade. (Very sensitive, very blue eyes.) Angel Haze performing at the Spotify House Spotify Ek knows, of course, that he has a long way to go, and that it's still way too early to claim victory . He comes across as modest, yet he's hardly lacking for confidence. He remains undeterred by the graveyard of digital music startups, and by suggestions that Google or Apple or Amazon , all gunning for his business, could crush him. Put simply, he said, "I'm more tenacious than most." A Commodore, a guitar, and a vision Fortunately, Ek was also naive when it came to thinking the major music labels would eagerly embrace his plan to make a legal version of Napster.

The quick bio of the tech music biz wunderkind goes like this: When Ek was 5, his parents, both musicians, gave him a Commodore Vic 20 computer and a guitar. He took to both. At 14, in the middle of 1990s Internet mania, Ek taught himself HTML and started a side business making commercial Web sites. He ran it from his school's computer lab, hired other teens with an aptitude for math or design, and soon was netting $15,000 a month. He packed his bedroom with servers. At 16, he applied for a job at Google, but was turned down because the company required a degree. Eventually, he enrolled at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, but, discovering he didn't like math, he dropped out after just two months. He landed a contract gig for an ad network called Tradedoubler to build an analytics tool. Martin Lorentzon, Spotify co-founder and chairman Spotify That stint paid off: Tradedoubler paid him $1 million for the rights to what he had built, and he made another $1 million selling the patents.

It also introduced Ek to his future Spotify co-founder, Martin Lorentzon -- who, now 44, serves as Spotify's chairman and Ek's key sounding board. (The two take Steve Jobs-like walks daily when the always-traveling Ek is at headquarters in Stockholm.) Ek was 23, rich, and unhappy. He'd flirted with the fast life -- he picked up a Ferrari and a swank apartment in Stockholm -- but he was unfulfilled. Ek dumped the car, retreated to a cabin, meditated, and played guitar, even toying with the idea of playing music full time. The result: a determination to combine his passion for music and tech. Ek teamed up with Lorentzon, who was Tradedoubler's chairman and far wealthier than Ek due to the company's 2005 IPO. They holed up in Ek's apartment, and built the product. It was modeled after iTunes, inspired by Napster, and packed with pirated music that they used as a demonstration to get licensing deals with the labels. That alone took two years -- and that was just for European licenses so they could launch in Scandinavia, France, the U.K., and Spain.

Sweden, where piracy was rampant, became the testing ground for the labels to allow free, ad-supported, on-demand music that Spotify would offer to lure paying subscribers. More than one third of the Swedish population now use Spotify. It would take almost another three years before Spotify inked deals to launch in the U.S. The Spotify House at SXSW James Martin Just a year and half since the U.S launch, the labels are no longer worried that Spotify will eat into iTunes sales. Instead, label execs privately complain that Spotify isn't growing fast enough, although it's on track to pay rights holders $500 million this year alone -- the same amount the company paid out in total since launching in 2008. The labels want Spotify to advertise more. The company last month launched its first-ever TV campaign and, just this morning, it rolled out an ad across the top of YouTube , which has become the go-to site for young people to listen to music . Music execs also want the company to strike partnerships with wireless carriers and Internet service providers to bundle the service, a strategy that fueled growth in Europe.

The aim: to expand the "funnel," which refers to the number of free users that Spotify has a chance to convert into paying customers. "It's so funny," said Ek. "When we started off, it was the other way around. 'We don't want a big funnel because it might risk cannibalizing other sales.' And now all they're talking about is how we can grow faster. At least our goals are 100-percent aligned." Well, not quite. Tension still exists. Ek complains, for instance, that music rights are still bound by national boundaries. Sometimes Ek will post a track on Facebook that people in other parts of the world can't even listen to. "That is one of our biggest limiters to growth, the restriction that you can't share any piece of content anywhere," he said, talking about the all organizations that make buying music rights so complex. "You need collecting societies in every market and publishing deals in every market." The result: Spotify now has rights deals with more than 50,000 entities. And so Ek and his team are constantly trying to change an outdated system, to push the old guard to bend. In their arsenal: a growing mountain of data.

That has been Spotify's leverage along the way, and to hear Ek talk about it, data holds the key to working toward that soundtrack-for-every-moment that he envisions. When Spotify was first negotiating with Warner Music Group for U.S. licenses, for instance, Warner wanted to restrict the amount of free music that people could access to three months, according to people involved with the negotiations. Spotify came back with data, culled from Scandinavia, that showed a lot of freeloaders become subscribers after four or five months. This was news to Warner, and it worked; they eventually settled on limitless, free access. Spotify is now nearing a new deal with the labels to let it offer more free music on its mobile app. Why? Its data shows that many people are discovering Spotify on their phones, ignoring the desktop client entirely. Mining the music That's all basic stuff, of course. But Ek said Spotify is collecting and analyzing more data related to music habits than any other company on the planet. Spotify is itself a platform, with companies like Blue Note , Billboard and Pitchfork creating apps that help people discover what they might want to hear, and sending rich streams of data to Spotify along the way.

And while listeners can stream privately, Spotify is social by default; to date, its users have created and shared some 1.5 billion playlists, all of which generate even more types of data to parse and, Ek hopes, to lock in customers as more competitors enter the streaming fray. "Our big problem is how do we make sense of what you want to listen to?" said Ek. "How do we make sense of 20 million songs? How do we make sense of what you want to hear when you wake up in the morning, when you go out on a Friday night? These are distinct moments in your life, and what we're trying to do is make sense of all that, to make sense of that ocean of data." Data man: Spotify economist Will Page Spotify That's where Will Page comes in. Page, a London-based economist with long ties to the music industry, joined Spotify last fall. He spends his days deep in Spotify data, exploring all sorts of questions: What leads to hits on Spotify? Can activity on Spotify predict a mainstream hit? How much life do which playlists add to what songs? What exactly leads to virality?

Why do older people listen to all 40 tracks of a particular compilation, where younger people listen to half that? And so on. "When you think about it, we don't just have unique data on every single stream on the service," said Page, who stressed the data is based on unique identifiers and don't reveal the person. "We also know where that stream was from -- whether it was driven by Spotify or Facebook -- and on top of that, you've got age, gender and location, and behavioral traits around playlists you've created or consumed. That's far more unique than somewhere like YouTube." The trick is to merge what the data shows with the technology, something that is gradually happening. At last year's Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, for example, attendees received a wristband with an RFID tag built in. Each time you visited a stage, you could check-in with a simple swipe at a hub. Then, when you fired up your Spotify account, it had new playlists based on the bands you saw at the festival. The whole effort was largely a marketing push, but it gives a glimpse of the tailored musical experience in action, and its something the folks at Spotify are now working on bringing to festivals the world over.

"That was a giant step in terms of connecting Spotify to live music," said Page. "This can happen at other events, where you wake up and Spotify knows where you were last night." The shift to mobile also opens up all sorts of possibilities, particularly because Spotify can know your phone's every step. One example: Ek said Spotify is working on software that would let you seamlessly switch what's playing through your phone's headphones to your home sound system the moment you walk through the front door. The idea is that your smartphone will recognize the home Wi-Fi signal, at which point it will ask you if you want to tap a button to change to the home mode. "Suddenly, your entire house is full of music," said Ek. Related stories Spotify tries to go mainstream, launches splashy ad campaign Making this future possible, too, is what Ek calls the "platformization" of everything. This phenomenon lets Spotify easily build its service into devices. Spotify now comes baked into some Samsung Smart TVs , Roku , Tivo , as well as in new Fords and Volvos . And Ek said the company is working on several more such initiatives to roll out this year. Set-top boxes and smart autos are one thing; touchless screens and wearable computing another.

Yet when you look at these steps -- on the hardware front, and Spotify's front -- it's easy to see them merging in ways that might even surprise Ek. Already, that happened when his contractor was going through refurbishing options for his home in Stockholm. Think picking carpet and paint colors is hard? Try deciding which room needs programmable sensors built into which walls so that the lights and music around the home could be triggered by movement. Think of the applications: Walk into the living room, the music and lights turn on; leave for, say, more than 10 minutes, and they turn off. Here's the example presented to Ek. He could put motion sensors in the baby's room, which would detect when the baby is asleep, at which point, the system would automatically dim the lights and start playing Barry White -- the technician's example, not Ek's -- for you and your wife in the other room. Then, when the baby wakes, the sensors cut the music and turn up the lights. Ek isn't going for that option, possibly because he's both single and without a baby. He doesn't yet know how he might build music into his house. But he holds this out as an example of where things are going.

"I'm not even suggesting that it's a great idea," Ek said. "We're only in the beginning of figuring out all these kinds of moments." Moments that, with the music labels and many publishers still in control of most of the world's music, will rely as much on negotiations and corporate politics as algorithms and data. Great tech innovators: Daniel Ek - Techradar India Great tech innovators: Daniel Ek A man who has changed the way he hear music By TechRadar | Jun 4, 2015, 06.27 PM IST Best known for: Spotify, music streaming Quote: "I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better." Daniel Ek isn't just a great innovator - he's a disruptor. Before creating music streaming service Spotify, the Swedish enterepeneur was involved in a number of other big projects that foreshadowed what was to come. Ek actually founded his first company, a website-building service, at the age of 14. At the age of 23 he became a multimillionaire after selling advertising company Advertigo to TradeDoubler.

However his big idea was for a music streaming service - but getting off the ground was going to be a challenge. In 2006 he became the CEO of file-sharing client uTorrent - a service that's not illegal, but which is often used to share files that aren't. As this was happening, Ludvig Strigeus, the man who built uTorrent, began building Spotify for Ek, who was soon pitching the idea to music labels. He told executives that selling CDs was an idea of the past, and that the future lay in streaming over the internet. Ek's belief was that streaming music for free with adverts would work, because people would pay for the convenience of removing them. Spotify was founded in 2006 by Ek and Martin Lorentzon, but didn't launch until 2008. It wasn't a global rollout, however; the service arrived in the UK in 2009 but didn't his the United States until 2011. Spotify now has over 60 million users and continues to grow rapidly in size and reach. Jump to now and it's obvious that Ek was right all along.

Ek didn't just build a music platform, he taught the music industry that streaming was in its interest. Spotify has completely revolutionised the way we listen to music, and has helped ease the problem of piracy eating into this industry. Entrepreneur. Innovator. Disruptor.

Question: What is the name of the music website founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and launched in 2008?
Answer: Spotify